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door, dropped her satchel on the loveseat and confronted the ancient Olivetti portable that seemed to stare accusingly at her from the desk beneath the open window. It was still there. So too the page she’d been working on, still jammed in the machine and curled up like a wood shaving with the humidity. For a moment she fussed over the greedy, deep-throated pitcher plants she’d dug up in the swamp—they loved flies, the fat bluebottles that sizzled against the rusty grid of the screen and drove her to distraction—then heated herself a cup of coffee on the hot plate, stepped outside half a dozen times to check on the progress of the storm, and finally, when the boredom threatened to shut down her mind, she settled down to work.
    She tried. She did. But she just couldn’t seem to concentrate. The story she was working on was a multiple point of view thing about a Japanese housewife who’d tried to drown herself and her two young children in Santa Monica Bay after her husband deserted her. It had been in all the papers. The children had drowned, while the woman, her lungs heavy, her throat raw and her eyes stung with salt, was pulled from the water and resuscitated by a seventeen-year-old surfer. Ruth had the surfer’s point of view down, no problem. But the children’s, that was harder. And the mother’s—what had been going through her head?
    Ruth worked for an hour, or what seemed like an hour—she had no way of marking time and she was glad of it—retyping the first paragraph over and over till she could barely make sense of it. Her heart just wasn’t in it. She kept thinking of Saxby. The night before they’d taken the ferry to the mainland and driven into Darien for drinks and dinner. On the way back he’d pulled off the road and they’d made love on the hood of the car. He lay back against thewindshield, hard all the way, in his cock, his thighs, the washboard muscles of his abdomen, and she’d climbed atop him, soft and flowering. And then she thought of the storm. And then of the big house, thirty-seven rooms and servants’ quarters, once the centerpiece of a cotton plantation, slaves beading sweat in the fields, mules and factors and all the rest, Saxby’s forefathers astride their buggies, whips in hand. She thought of
Gone With the Wind, Roots, The Confessions of Nat Turner,
and then she went back to her story, straining to focus on her character, the distraught woman cut off from her culture, her heavy-lidded eyes, fine hands and fingers, and all at once the face of Hiro Tanaka—frozen with fear in the cold crepuscular light of Peagler Sound—rose up before her.
    Chinese. She’d thought he was Chinese. But then she’d never traveled any farther east than the sushi bars of Little Japan or the chop suey houses of Chinatown, and to this point in her life she’d never had any need to differentiate one nationality from another. If the sign outside said Vietnamese, then they were Vietnamese; if it said Thai, then they were Thai. She knew Asians only as people who served dishes with rice. Chinese. How stupid of her. Here she was, trying to conjure up a Japanese housewife from a newspaper account, and a real living breathing Japanese—a desperado, a ship jumper and fugitive—practically throws himself in her naked lap and she thinks he’s a waiter from Chow Foo Luck.
    It was strange. She couldn’t get the image of him out of her head. Where was he? What was he eating? What was he thinking? He’d been ashore a week now and he was still at large, hiding out, buried somewhere in the weeds. There were reports of him everywhere—Saxby swore he’d seen him running for the bushes out back of Cribbs’ Handi-Mart—but where was he? The whole island was in an uproar, from the blacks at Hog Hammock to the veiny retirees of Tupelo Shores Estates. The newspaper account had made him out to be something of